Digital Photography Tip For Beginners: Crop Your Photos

Digital Photography Tip For the beginners:

Cropping refers to the removal of the outer parts of an image for different reasons (improve framing, resizing the picture, etc...)


In photography, there are times that when taking photos we unintentionally got some unwanted parts with it or simply got too much background. In the photo below, the girl happens to walk by just as the button was clicked.

By simply cropping it using Microsoft's Picture Manager, I cropped the extra parts of the photo and made the person off center to show some of the background.

Another advantage of cropping your photos is you can make an uninteresting photo into something else. In the photo below you can simply say that the boy is just trying to shoot the ball from quite a distance.

By simply cropping the photo a bit, removing the kid that has thrown the ball... the result is, you don't know where the ball is coming from and it would seem that the ball came from straight up and those kids are waiting for it to fall.

How to crop the pictures
If you're new to both digital photography and photo editing and you don't have Adobe Photoshop or any other image editing tools, you can use a number of photo editors to do the cropping. If you are a Microsoft user and have MS Office installed, you can use the MS Office Picture Manager which I will give the steps in this simple tutorial.

1. Open the image you want to crop with the Picture Manager. If Picture Manager is not the default program set to open your image files, right click on the image, then select 'Open With' then look for the MS Office Picture Manager.
2. From the Main Menu click on Picture then Crop. Or from the toolbar select Edit Pictures  then on the right panel, select Crop
3. Then drag the thick corners or the thick lines on any of the four sides to select the parts that you are going to remove. Take note, everything outside the four thick corners will be deleted.
4. Click OK, if you are done.
5. If you are not satisfied with the result, press CTRL-Z on the keyboard to undo the crop and do it again.

For Unix based users, you can always use GIMP to edit your photos.

You can also try editing your photo using http://pixlr.com which is an online photo editor that you can use for free and it doesn't matter what operating system you are using.